Dell eyes Bangladesh as a major device market

Shahzad Aslam Khan, Country Manager, Dell Bangladesh

Dell has been a major IT player globally. With growing no. of server solutions, PCs and laptops- it’s becoming a dominating local player as well. Shahzad Aslam Khan the Country Manager of Dell Bangladesh sits with Shahriar Rahman from BYTES to talk about Dell’s plan for the coming years.

How was Dell’s business in Bangladesh and globally last year?

As you may have heard, Dell went private last October. So basically we embarked on a new journey. Interestingly it has been just over a year from then. Dell worldwide has over exceeded the targets set by our leadership. We have set higher target for ourselves because once we went private we knew we could do things faster. Our goal is to meet our customer’s expectation and to provide technical solutions to them. Dell is currently no.1 globally in terms of server solutions. In the last 3 out of 4 quarters Dell has been no.1 provider of server equipment and solutions in the Asia Pacific Region. One milestone that I personally am proud of is Dell being the world’s no.1 storage solutions in terms of Terabytes shipped. That is definitely a new high for us. It is also a strong indicator of Dell becoming a complete technology provider.

Dell has been officially in Bangladesh since 2011. So in larger scheme of things it is not that long time. But we have done phenomenally well in these last 3 years. We have established ourselves as a strong IT player. In Bangladesh we are currently in leadership position both in terms of X86 servers as well as on the client side i.e. desktops and laptops.

As a matter of fact we are currently having discussions about the very same thing. We do intend to bring tablets. And you may see them within a couple of months. We are really excited about that. Regarding hybrids and 2 in 1’s – we have some products available already in the market. In the coming months you will be able to see more of these products.

This year what products can we expect to see in Bangladesh from Dell?

We already launched a couple of key products for Bangladeshi market. So I will just start with the first thing that we launched: it’s an Inspiron all-in-one PC. This is the thinnest all-in-one product which is touch enabled and has battery within the device itself. And it is 19.5 inch and if you want you can use it like a huge tablet too. This is a new category for Bangladesh and we brought it just because we saw many of our customers were really interested about it.

We already covered about tablets. Again that’s another new area for Bangladesh. We will also be launching some specialized storage solutions. We are hoping that these storage solutions will be doing extremely well based on the discussion we had with our partners. The great thing about Dell is it provides end to end solution for Hardware and software. So to summarize: do expect to get great products from us throughout the year with excellent performance and great price-points. All in all: Dell eyes Bangladesh as huge device market.

Why isn’t Dell stepping in the mobile device market?

Well, as you know mobile devices are a huge market and the opportunity is tremendous. But being a huge market means the competition is really stiff. Already there are hundreds of big player competing every day. We think that Dell could do much better by keeping its focus on what it does best: bringing out PCs, laptops and server solutions.

There are rumors about Dell splitting its business in two segments: PC & server; like the way HP did. Is it true?

It’s a really good question. Yes we have seen companies like IBM spin off their PC business to Lenovo; we have seen HP on the verge of splitting its businesses as well. But it’s not true for Dell. Our leadership feels strongly that the best to provide what the customers need is by keeping Dell as one whole entity. The reason is customers can rely only on one company for all the solutions. We humbly submit- Dell is the only company able to provide complete end to end solution and we do want to keep it that way.

Being a tech professional with 15 years of experience, what is your opinion about the paradigm shift happening in this industry? What would be the Next Big Thing?

The industry has evolved tremendously over the last couple years. Now the name of the game is: cloud infrastructure, virtualization, big data, security and so on. But my personal opinion would be ‘Internet of Things’. It’s a concept that we were barely able to scratch the surface. I think this would be the next big thing.